Glad to see making that topic and leaving it in my Sig was worth doing! ^_^

Love the work you've done and looking forward to downloading it!

Is this still alive?

it sure is,

I had to take a break until i finsihed my last term of grade 12, but that ends in 2 days so this should get a kickstart by next week

EDIT: the last update i did over at TESA

Oh ok nice, if you need any help with this or so just ask.

Hope we don't get stuck in doors, but since I am a Sagittarius, I deem this awesome.

What are you going to base the races stats off of?

Greek Mythology, where many are savage monsters, and one intelligent one (Charon).

Or off of Modern Fantasy, archers,warriors, regular dudes with horse bodies, not very magic-y? And sneaking with these dudes will be killer, no freaking way you can sneak a horse through some of the places you have to go. No DB quest for us.

Good luck, modeling and animating takes a long time, good thing I'm only going for Illustration for a major.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3701

Maybe these will help

Thought I might post this to get an opinion,

Been doing some testing and experimenting on what to do. Now from what I can see I have two choices for this project:

1. I use the horse skeleton and merge the animations into the human ones.
Advantages:
This is the best looking way of doing it, and requires very little in the way of rigging or mesh work on my part (which Im not that great at).
Should cut down on the amount of animations to edit

Disadvantages
It means that you will not be able to sneak, as there is nothing like that for a horse and I doubt anything could work for it. I can do a simple script so that you can go into sneak mode when still (check detection, do marksman criticals) so that you dont lose that. But as raised before, how could a horse sneak anyway?


2. I use double human animations (as seen in the videos)
Advantages:
No restriction on what the centaur can do.
I dont have to merge the horse animations (which Im still trying to find the best way)

Disadvantages:
Animation will look bad at times, I can can already see how bad the running animation is, and no doubt there will be more like it later. I fear this too could take alot of work in the long run.


What do people want to see?

i prefer 1...i don't really see centuars as being sneaky anyway

Yeah, it seems ridiculous to suggest that someone with the body of a horse should be able to sneak at all. The advantages heavily outweigh the disadvantages for the first option, so I would have to go with that.

I'm glad someone is finally making a centaur for oblivion, this looks pretty good!!

I'd use a mix of animations too, to make them actualy walk and run like a horse. What you said about giving them the sneaking bonus if they're not moving sounds to be a good solution. I'd also increase the horse part a little bit to make them look more "heavy", but I guess that's up to my tastes.

I would love to play as a centaur, and this work looks great so far. BUT the horse part of the body is absolutely to small. It looks like the upperbody of a man, and the rest of a small colt. The original size would fit much better. With the real size it would be to big for the most buildings, but it just does not look like mighty centaur now.

Walking very, very slowly?

But I think you should do what looks better. Small losses will not be a big deal.

option 1, centaurs can't sneak...

Just checked out the youtube vid, it looks great.

Sneaking will be a bit of an issue, but is it possible to have the game go into sneak mode without making the character pose for it? Or at least you could use some sort of dummy pose? I mean, if they're gonna be a playable character, it's a bit unfair to make them disadvantaged to other players.

Another thing... how will riding horses be handled? (suggestion: Maybe they have the Beast Tongue power, and automatically use it when they activate a horse?)

Well, while I can't see a centaur sneaking either, I can see where a centaur would need to at least crouch.

At least, toggle sneak makes the centaur do a sitting thing and then restrict movement.



That should be possible, I hope.

Lovely to see this alive again.

You're far along already.
Making it more horse-man like than man-horse like would do it good.

Just can't see a centaur trying to by sneaky, having hoof in all, all that weight,

Option 1 I say has well..

glad to see project still going

Okay, thanks to some nifscripts magic, all my issues with NiBSplineCompTransformInterpolator are now gone.

Seeing the supoort, ill be doing the first option, but i may try and make a lying down horse pose for sneak mode (so that it shows you cannot move). I realise I have to do this to make the sneak mode work as the upperpart would go down, but not the horse bit if I didnt.

Hopefully using some blender magic I can get the animations to merge easier, Im looking into it.

I will try and do something about the size of the horse, but I am restricted as the horse bit cannot be higher then the waist of the human.

EDIT: After a few hours work with Nifskope, blender and a Hex editor it seems I have found a way to convert the horse animations over to my huamn skeleton that wont takes hours to do. Still a one bug to fix with it though (as i cannot import it into blender yet) but hopefully it will work.

maybe you could give them a 100% chamelean spell, although that might be over powered i think it is better than not being able to sneak

that would be even worse, chamelean at a button press makes no sense.

I see the inability to sneak as the main disability for the race, it is built for combat and magic instead and will have advantages in those areas.
That brings me to another point.

What abilities should this race have? How big should the speed boost be? what else?


Still having my import error, anyone know what this error means?

ValueError: StringPalette: no string starts at offset 18

I presume it is from having to rebuild the string palette in nifskope so that my bones are named correctly, but I dont know how to fix it, still awaiting a reponse by PM from those I have asked.

will you move around like a normal character ro move as if you are on a horse? Maybe you should give it some speed burst ability

Loaded it up in-game today to test my sneak animation,

what do people think? http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1259715193/gallery_108_44_93385.jpg

People think that's looking quite interesting.
One could even imagine crawling forward like this.
Nice work!

i think his knees are gonna be sore in the mornin'

As a machinimator, I can hardly wait.

As a gamer, I hope this thing can run REALLY fast.

I have a question: what are you going to do about the horses in the game already? Will centaur players be able to ride them? That would be wierd.